After all that time, it's still a thrill for him any time he lays eyes on the composer's actual handwriting.

And, he said, a lot of people feel that way about the lock of Beethoven's hair that Meredith will bring to San Antonio this weekend.

“They feel it allows them to be in Beethoven's presence,” Meredith said. “And then there are people that think it's kind of creepy. In the U.S. today, there's two opinions about everything.”

That long, curled lock of hair is known as the Guevara Lock, after the principal investor in the four-person team who purchased it in 1994. It has inspired a book (Russell Martin's “Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved”) and a documentary (“Beethoven's Hair”). It will also feature in Meredith's lecture before two of this weekend's San Antonio Symphony Beethoven Festival concerts.

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Meredith will talk about the tests that have been done on the hair and on some fragments of Beethoven's skull owned by a California family. The tests have revealed some fascinating things about Beethoven's health, including the fact that he didn't take any pain killers at the end of his life.

“For the last four months of his life, even though he had this terribly painful final illness, he didn't use the opiate painkillers that were the only painkillers available at the time,” Meredith said. “Most theorize that he wanted to keep composing and felt he couldn't do it in an opiate-induced trance.”

Information about Beethoven's health is significant, he said, “because it played an important part in his composing career.

“His deafness is what many people think started his middle heroic period. When he knew he was going deaf, he thought about committing suicide, but decided not to because he felt he had to compose all the music within him before he could do that. This is not just sort of snooping around in somebody's medical chart — there is a connection to the music.

“I don't think anyone would care about this unless Beethoven wrote such great music.”